Argleton: A story of maps, maths and motorways

Argleton is a novelette that I wrote in 2010. Through the magic of Kickstarter, I turned it into a self-publishing project, producing paperbacks and hand-bound hardbacks for supporters.

Blurb

Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. No one knows how the mistake made its way into the most widely used map in the world. Accusations that it was a ‘copyright trap’ intended to catch out businesses using the map data without paying for a licence are vigorously denied. GeoMaps promises to remove the anomaly but yet, it persists.

Finally, Matt can resist no longer. He persuades his friend and flatmate Charlie to drive them both down to to find the non-existent town. And when they are standing on the very spot, at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.

Audiobook

If you’d like to share any of these files with your friends, please do. Argleton is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 licence, so feel free to do mash-ups, translations, or anything else with it, so long as you don’t sell it or works based on it.

Reviews

Argleton has had a couple of reviews already:

Beth Dunn, who described it as a “a beautiful, beautiful handmade book”.

Fiona Campbell-Howes, who said of the story, “far more accomplished than I expected, nipping along at an engaging pace and weaving all kinds of geeky concepts – memes, trolls, copyright traps, smartphone apps, geolocation, data mashups, crowdsourcing, alternate reality games – into an absorbing and satisfying story that really made me feel as if I was there with the main characters.”

Queen of the May

Every year, on May Day, a young woman is stolen away by the faeries to become their Queen for a year. This year, though, the faeries have bitten off more than they can chew. Shakti Nayar will do whatever it takes to get her own life as a botanist back. As she struggles to work out how to get home, she uncovers Faerie’s dark secret and finds that she is not the only human who needs saving.

The Lacemaker

All the threads looked the same to the innocent eye, but Maude could see the black heart running up through one strand as it wove its way through the lace roundel. She busied herself with tidying her bobbins as a customer browsed the lace mats on her stall.

“I’ll take this one,” the woman said, holding up a square piece, twelve inches across. Maude winced, picked up the piece she had just completed and held it out to the woman for her consideration.

Argleton

Matt is fascinated by the story of Argleton, the unreal town that appeared on GeoMaps but which doesn’t actually exist. When he and his friend and flatmate Charlie are standing at the exact longitude and latitude that defines Argleton, Matt sets in motion a chain of events that will take him places he didn’t know existed… and which perhaps don’t.

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